Positions that Lyndon B. Johnson has held:

Lyndon B. Johnson was a participant or observer in the following events:

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1957, the first such law to pass Congress since the federal civil rights laws of 1875. The law allows the US attorney general to bring suits to address discrimination and voter intimidation against African-Americans and other minorities. The CRA is the jumping-off point of successive legislative attempts to grant equal rights and protections for minority citizens. President Eisenhower was never a vocal supporter of civil rights, believing that such changes had to come from within the “heart” and not be imposed by legislation from Washington. However, he does support the CRA, and helped push it through Congress against entrenched resistance, largely but not entirely from Southern Democrats determined to protect segregationist practices even after the landmark Brown v. Board decision (see May 17, 1954). The CRA originally created a new division within the Justice Department to monitor civil rights abuses, but Senate Democrats, led by Lyndon Johnson (D-TX), worked to water down the bill in order to keep Southern Democrats and more liberal Democrats from the west and northeast from tearing the party apart along ideological lines. Johnson, along with Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS), rewrote the CRA to take much of its power away. The final version does grant new protections for African-American voters, pleasing the liberals of the Democratic Party, but contains almost no enforcement procedures for those found obstructing African-Americans’ attempts to vote, thus mollifying the conservative wing of the party. Eisenhower himself admitted that he did not understand parts of the bill. African-American leader Ralph Bunche, a prominent US diplomat, calls the act a sham and says he would rather have no bill than the CRA. But Bayard Rustin, a leader of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), says the bill has symbolic value as the first piece of civil rights legislation passed in 82 years. [History Learning Site, 2012; American Civil Liberties Union, 2012]

The adoption of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment prohibits Congress and the 50 states from imposing poll taxes or other types of taxes on voters participating in federal elections. Before World War II, an African-American citizen told a reporter, “Do you know I’ve never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax?” During the ceremony formalizing the adoption of the amendment, President Lyndon Johnson says, “There can be no one too poor to vote.” [American Civil Liberties Union, 2012; The Constitution: Amendments 11-27, 2012; America's Library, 2012] Among other laws it overturns, the amendment invalidates the 1937 Supreme Court ruling that found poll taxes legal (see December 6, 1937).

The transformative Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes Congress. The law makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, or gender in voting, public places, the workplace, and schools. Former President John F. Kennedy had argued for new civil rights legislation, saying that previous legislative efforts (see August 29, 1957 and May 6, 1960) did not go far enough. Kennedy waited until 1963 to send his legislation to Congress, and was assassinated before the bill was passed. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy told the public, “The negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one-third as much chance of completing college; one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.” His successor, Lyndon Johnson, a conservative Southern Democrat, surprised many by pushing the bill instead of falling in line with conservative Southern Democrats who opposed it. Johnson and Senate leaders successfully fought back a filibuster by Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) and 17 other segregationist Democratic senators who tried to derail the bill; it passed the Senate on a 73-24 vote. Some believe that the passage of the bill is one of the major legislative acts that drives many Southern Democrats to leave the party for the increasingly conservative venue of the Republican Party. The word “sex,” to prohibit gender-based discrimination, was added to the legislation at the last minute by Representative Howard W. Smith (D-VA), and some accused Smith of inserting the provision as a means to kill the entire bill. Smith argued that he was supportive of efforts by women’s rights organizations, and inserted the language in a sincere effort to curb discrimination against women. Smith is joined by Representative Martha W. Griffiths (D-MI) in keeping the provision in the bill. Perhaps the most significant provision of the bill is the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged with implementing the law. The EEOC will use the practice of “affirmative action” to curb discrimination, including mandating hiring of minorities and women to alleviate many employers’ practice of hiring white males almost exclusively, especially for more senior positions. President Johnson will extend his support to “affirmative action,” and is perhaps the first public figure to use the phrase in addressing the public. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 2008; National Archives, 2012; American Civil Liberties Union, 2012]

Irving Kristol’s 1995 book, ‘Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea’ [Source: Yurica Report]Academic Irving Kristol founds a magazine, “The Public Interest,” and fills it with political and social commentary by himself and his increasingly conservative followers. Kristol will later describe himself and his comrades as “liberals mugged by reality.” He leads a nascent ideological movement—later turned “neoconservativism”—marked by attacks on President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” economic policies and “New Left” thinkers. Early shapers and proponents of this new, aggressive conservatism include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Diana Trilling, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Midge Decter. The more unpopular their views become with their friends and academic colleagues, the more insular and withdrawn they become. Author Craig Unger will write in 2007, “In part, their apostasy could be attributed to angst about their careers and social standing” along with their shifting political beliefs. Kristol’s group tends to live, work, and socialize with one another, in an increasingly exclusive and insular group. Much of their attacks on their former liberal and counterculture friends are rooted as much in personal antipathy and a desire to avenge social slights as in ideological differences, and their attacks tend to veer away from criticism of positions and into personal invective. (Interestingly, Podhoretz once tries to convince his former friend, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, to join his neoconservative group, an effort which Ginsberg harshly repudiates. The poet later recalls Podhoretz’s conversion attempt as “an epiphanous moment in my relation with Podhoretz and what he was part of—a large, right-wing, protopolice surveillance movement.”) At this point, most neoconservatives still identify themselves, however reluctantly, with the Democratic Party. [Unger, 2007, pp. 35-36]

Alabama police attack civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma, Alabama. [Source: Library of Congress]Over 500 non-violent civil rights marchers are attacked by law enforcement officers during a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The attack takes place while the marchers are crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma. The march is to protest the disenfranchisement of African-American voters, and to protest the fatal police shooting of civil rights activist Jimmy Lee Jackson. The marchers are badly beaten by police officers and white residents wielding billy clubs and tear gas, and driven back into Selma. The marchers heed the non-violent teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, and refuse to counterattack. The attack, later termed “Bloody Sunday,” is shown on national television, sparking a national outcry. Two days later, King will lead a symbolic march to the bridge, and he and other civil rights leaders will secure court protection for a third, large-scale march from Selma to Montgomery. A week later, President Lyndon Johnson will denounce the attack as “deadly wrong.” On March 21, King will lead some 3,200 marchers from Selma to Montgomery, reaching the capitol on March 25. By the time they reach Montgomery, the number of marchers will have grown to around 25,000. The attack helps spur the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA—see August 6, 1965). [National Park Service, 2001; American Civil Liberties Union, 2012]

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. Based on the Fifteenth Amendment (see February 26, 1869), the VRA is a potent set of statutes that permanently bars direct barriers to political participation by racial and ethnic minorities. It bans any election practice that denies the right to vote due to race, and requires areas with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval of changes in their election laws before they can take effect. The VRA forbids literacy tests (see 1896, April 25, 1898, and June 8, 1959) and other barriers to registration that have worked to stop minority voters from exercising their rights (see 1888, June 21, 1915, and February 4, 1964). Sections 2 and 5 of the VRA work together to prohibit states from establishing voting qualifications or standards that interfere with a citizen’s right to vote on a racial basis. Section 5 requires states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department before altering any laws pertaining to voting—this includes changing electoral districts, voter qualification rules, and even changes in government structure such as making a formerly elective office appointive. If the changes can be seen as possibly “diluting” minority voting strength, they can be disallowed. States wishing to challenge the VRA restrictions have the opportunity to have their cases heard in federal court. Section 2 has similar, if less restrictive, provisions that apply nationally. Section 10 of the VRA takes direct aim at the Breedlove ruling from the Supreme Court (see December 6, 1937), which had legitimized poll taxes used to disenfranchise minority voters. That portion of the VRA finds that poll taxes “impose… unreasonable financial hardship” and “precludes persons of limited means from voting.” The VRA also forbids the use of literacy tests, good character tests, and other such tests used in the past to suppress minority voting. The law urges the attorney general to urge the Court to overrule Breedlove; minutes after Johnson signs the bill into law, he directs the attorney general “to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the poll tax.” The Court will find poll taxes unconstitutional in its Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ruling (see March 24, 1966). The US Department of Justice and the federal courts now have the power to monitor problem jurisdictions and assist private citizens in seeking redress through the courts if their voting rights are infringed. Months later, the Supreme Court will uphold the constitutionality of the VRA. [eNotes, 2004; American Civil Liberties Union, 2012; Yale Law School, 2/8/2012]

Commenting on the recent coup in Ghana (see February 24, 1966), Robert W. Komer, a special assistant to the president, says in a memo to President Johnson that the overthrow of the Nkrumah government was “another example of a fortuitous windfall.” He gloats over the win noting that “Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African” and that the “new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western.” He then goes on to emphasize that the US should “follow through skillfully and consolidate such successes.” He explains: “A few thousand tons of surplus wheat or rice, given now when the new regimes are quite uncertain as to their future relations with us, could have a psychological significance out of all proportion to the cost of the gesture. I am not arguing for lavish gifts to these regimes—indeed, giving them a little only whets their appetites, and enables us to use the prospect of more as leverage.” [National Security Council, 3/12/1966; SeeingBlack (.com), 6/7/2002]

President Lyndon Johnson hears a complaint from Greece’s ambassador to the US about the US’s interference in his nation’s affairs. In a private conversation in the Oval Office, Johnson tells the ambassador: “Listen to me, Mr. Ambassador! F_ck your parliament and your constitution! America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good.… We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliaments, and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last long.” [Hunt, 9/1/2009, pp. 6]

The Office of Emergency Planning, which is responsible for parts of the federal government’s civil defense and continuity of government plans, is renamed the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). Federal agencies responsible for emergency planning have undergone several duty and title changes over the past two decades (see December 1, 1950, December 16, 1950, June 12, 1953, July 1, 1958, and July 20, 1961). The changes, the New York Times notes, have created a “tale of more names than even government civil servants care to remember.” The latest change is largely superficial and comes as the result of Public Law 90-608, which was drafted and presented to Congress by President Johnson. [New York Times, 12/14/1968, pp. 19]

During the administration of US President Richard Nixon, and under the counsel of his advisor for National Security Affairs Henry Kissinger, the United States drops more than two million tons of bombs on Laos during more than 500,000 bombing missions—exceeding what it had dropped on Germany and Japan during all of World War II—in an effort to defeat the left-leaning Pathet Lao and to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines. The ordnance includes some 90 million cluster bombs, 20-30 percent of which do not detonate (see After 1973). A Senate report finds: “The United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas and to interdict North Vietnamese infiltration… throughout all this there has been a policy of subterfuge and secrecy… through such things as saturation bombing and the forced evacuation of population from enemy held or threatened areas—we have helped to create untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers.” And in 1970, Far Eastern Economic Review reports: “For the past two years the US has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos…. Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants… Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes.” [Blum, 1995; BBC, 1/5/2001; Stars and Stripes, 7/21/2002; BBC, 12/6/2005] Meo villagers who attempt neutrality or refuse to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the CIA’s army, are refused American-supplied rice and “ultimately bombed by the US Air Force.” [Blum, 1995] The CIA also drops millions of dollars in forged Pathet Lao currency in an attempt to destabilize the Lao economy. [Blum, 1995] During this period, the existence of US operations in Laos is outright denied. [Blum, 1995; Stars and Stripes, 7/21/2002]

An exhaustive study of the US’s involvement in Vietnam since 1945 is completed. The study was ordered in early 1967 by then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, partly to determine how the situation in Southeast Asia had gotten so out of hand. The study, entitled “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967,” is by the “Vietnam Study Task Force,” led by Leslie H. Gelb, the director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Pentagon, and comprised of 36 military personnel, historians, and defense analysts from the RAND Corporation and the Washington Institute for Defense Analysis. The study is huge, composed of 47 volumes and spanning 7,000 pages of material. It covers the time from 1945, when Vietnam was under French colonial rule, through the 1968 Tet Offensive. The study conclusively shows that each US administration, from Harry S. Truman through Lyndon B. Johnson, had knowingly and systematically deceived the American people over the US’s involvement and interventions in the region. Historian John Prados will later observe that the study, later dubbed the “Pentagon Papers” after it is leaked by RAND analyst and task force member Daniel Ellsberg (see September 29, 1969 and March 1971), represents “a body of authoritative information, of inside government deliberations that demonstrated, beyond questioning, the criticisms that antiwar activists had been making for years, not only were not wrong, but in fact, were not materially different from things that had been argued inside the US government.” [Moran, 2007]

Abe Fortas. [Source: US Senate]Abe Fortas resigns from the Supreme Court under pressure. Fortas, a liberal Democrat and political crony of outgoing president Lyndon Johnson, was originally chosen by Johnson to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren, but conservatives in the Senate blocked Fortas’s confirmation (see June 23, 1969). President Nixon intended to fill the Court with as many of his choices as possible, and he, along with conservative Republicans and Democrats who do not agree with Fortas’s liberal stance on civil rights, targeted Fortas for a smear campaign designed to force him off the bench. Nixon used what White House counsel John Dean will later call “an ugly bluff” against Fortas: He has Attorney General John Mitchell inform Fortas that he intends to open a special probe into Fortas’s dealings—while on the bench—with a financier already under investigation. Mitchell insinuates that he will put Fortas’s wife, herself an attorney and partner at Fortas’s former law firm, and other former partners of Fortas’s on the witness stand. Whether Fortas actually had any direct illegal dealings with this financier is unclear—certainly his dealings had such an appearance—but the bluff worked; Fortas agreed to retire early, thus clearing a position on the Court for Nixon to fill. Nixon will find it difficult to replace Fortas with one of the Southern conservatives he wants on the Court; Senate Democrats will lead successful efforts to block the nomination of two of Nixon’s nominees, the respected, moderately conservative Clement Haynsworth, and the virulently racist G. Harrold Carswell, himself recommended by Mitchell’s assistant, William Rehnquist. (Carswell’s failed nomination will produce a memorable statement from Senator Roman Hruska (R-NE), who, in defense of Carswell, tells the Senate: “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?”) Nixon will use the defeats to make political hay in the South by claiming that Senate Democrats do not want a Southerner on the bench. [Dean, 2007, pp. 127-129]

Warren Burger. [Source: US Government]Former appellate judge Warren Burger begins his term as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger was named months before by newly elected president Richard Nixon after two earlier candidates, former Eisenhower attorney general Herbert Brownell and former GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, turned down the job. Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas was to be Chief Justice as one of then-president Lyndon Johnson’s last acts, but Senate Republicans, supported by conservative Senate Democrats who oppose Fortas’s civil rights rulings, successfully filibustered Fortas’s nomination and actually forced Fortas’s premature resignation (see May 14, 1969). The blocking of Fortas has an additional element: in June 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he would step down, giving Johnson ample time to place Fortas in the position. However, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon wanted to name the Chief Justice himself, if he won the national election. To that end, Nixon sent word to Congressional Republicans to block Johnson’s naming of a replacement for Warren. Senate Republicans launched the filibuster after being given information that intimated Fortas had received an inordinately large honorarium for teaching a course at American University, a sum said to have been raised by one of his former law partners. [Dean, 2007, pp. 127-128]

President Nixon, regretting his removal of the secret tape recorders in the White House left behind by former president Lyndon Johnson, orders the installation of a sophisticated, secret taping system in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, which will, when activated, record every spoken word and telephone conversation in either chamber (see July 13-16, 1973). The Oval Office’s microphones will be voice-activated; the Cabinet Room’s with a switch. Nixon orders his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to see to the installation, and to keep it extremely quiet. Haldeman delegates the installation to aides Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. Haldeman decides the Army Signal Corps should not install the system because someone in that group might report back to the Pentagon; instead he has the Secret Service’s technical security division install it. The work is done late at night; five microphones are embedded in Nixon’s Oval Office desk, and two more in the wall light fixtures on either side of the fireplace, over the couch and chairs where Nixon often greets visitors. All three phones are wiretapped. By February 16, the system in both chambers is in place. All conversations are recorded on Sony reel-to-reel tape recorders, with Secret Service agents changing the reels every day and storing the tapes in a small, locked room in the Executive Office Building. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 305]

President Nixon tries to come up with ways to use the recently leaked “Pentagon Papers” (see June 13, 1971) to his own advantage. If the papers contain anything about former president John F. Kennedy’s supposed role in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, “I want that out,” he tells aide Charles Colson. “I said that [Diem] was murdered.… I know what those b_stards were up to.” Did former President Lyndon B. Johnson stop the US bombings of Vietnamese targets just before the 1968 elections to try to prevent Nixon from being elected? “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff and it might be worth doing,” chief of staff H. R. Haldeman suggests (see June 17, 1972). [Reeves, 2001, pp. 334-335]

During a conversation on how to best use the “Pentagon Papers” to their own advantage (see June 17, 1971), President Nixon asks chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger why they could never prove that former President Lyndon Johnson halted US bombings of Vietnam for political reasons. Haldeman has suggested that they could use such proof to blackmail Johnson. “G_ddamnit, I asked for it,” he says. “I said I needed it.” Kissinger replies: “Bob and I have been trying to put the thing together for three years. We have nothing here, Mr. President.” Then Haldeman interjects, “But there is a file on it.” Nixon pounces. “Where?” Haldeman replies that White House aide Tom Charles Huston is sure that such a file exists at the Brookings Institution. Nixon suggests that someone break into the Institution and take the files (see June 30-July 1, 1971). “I want it implemented.… G_ddamnit, get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 334-335]

President George Bush sends a “formal determination” on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction to Congress in the form of a letter to Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and Senate President Robert Byrd (D-WV). Congress had required, in its October 2002 authorization of military force (see October 10, 2002), that Bush affirm that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iraq WMD crisis were no longer possible, and that Iraq had tangible ties to the 9/11 attackers or similar terrorists. The letter provides neither. Instead, it merely reiterates the language of the statute itself, using that language as the determination. The determination says that Congress itself had found evidence of Iraq’s diplomatic intransigence and of Iraq’s connections to the 9/11 terrorists, when Congress has found neither. Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean will comment: “Bush, like a dog chasing his tail who gets ahold of it, relied on information the White House provided Congress for its draft resolution; then he turned around and claimed that this information (his information) came from Congress. From this bit of sophistry, he next stated that these congressional findings were the basis of his ‘determination.’” The only additional information Bush provides is a citation from Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations (see February 5, 2003), where Powell noted the supposed existence of a terrorist training camp in the Salman Pak military facility (see April 6, 2003), a training camp that does not exist. Bush also cites “public reports” indicating that Iraq is harboring al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (see October 2, 2002), and that Iraq has “provided training in document forgery and explosives to [al-Qaeda].” Bush provides no evidence of his claims. Dean writes that the law has stringent requirements for such “presidential determinations,” mandating solid evidence, legal citations, and so forth, but Bush’s “determination” contains none of this. “If there is a precedent for Bush’s slick trick to involve America in a bloody commitment, where the Congress requires as a condition for action that the president make a determination, and the president in turn relies on a whereas clause… and a dubious public report… I am not aware of it and could not find anything even close.” [Dean, 2004, pp. 148-152]

Fox Business Channel host and commentator John Stossel says a key portion of the Civil Rights Act should be eliminated, because, he says, “[p]rivate businesses ought to get to discriminate.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] The 1964 Civil Rights Act (see July 2, 1964), signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson, prohibits discrimination in public places, provides for the integration of public schools and other public facilities, and makes employment discrimination illegal. [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; National Archives, 2011] Stossel, a guest on Fox News’s America Live, tells host Megyn Kelly that he agrees with libertarian Rand Paul, a Republican candidate for the US Senate, in recommending that the portion of the Civil Rights Act mandating no discrimination in public places should be repealed. (Both Paul and Stossel argue that the Americans with Disabilities Act should also be repealed—see May 17, 2010 and September 1, 2010). Paul has said: “[Y]ou should let businesses decide for themselves whether they are going to be racist or not racist. Because once the government gets involved, it’s a slippery slope.” When Kelly quotes this comment from Paul, Stossel says he is “in total agreement” with Paul, stating: “[I]f a private business wants to say, ‘We don’t want any blond anchorwomen or mustached guys,’ it ought to be their right. Are we going to say to the black students’ association they have to take white people, or the gay softball association they have to take straight people? We should have freedom of association in America.” (Kelly is a blond anchorwoman, and Stossel wears a mustache.) Kelly says: “When you put it like that it sounds fine, right? So who cares if a blond anchorwoman and mustached anchorman can’t go into the lunchroom. But as you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came around because it was needed. Blacks weren’t allowed to sit at the lunch counter with whites. They couldn’t, as they traveled from state to state in this country, they couldn’t go in and use a restroom. They couldn’t get severed meals and so on, and therefore, unfortunately in this country a law was necessary to get them equal rights.” Stossel notes that those “Jim Crow” doctrines “were government rules. Government was saying we have white and black drinking fountains. That’s very different from saying private people can’t discriminate.” Stossel says that business owners should be free to discriminate, and if the “free market” punishes them by costing them customers, then that is a fair way to handle it. Kelly says the time of the Civil Rights Act “was a different time. Racism and discrimination was rampant. I’m not saying it’s been eliminated. But it was rampant. It was before my time, before I was born, but obviously I’ve read history, and I know that there is something wrong when a person of color can’t get from state to state without stopping at a public restroom or a public lunchroom to have a sandwich.” Stossel says: “But the public restroom was run by the government, and maybe at the time that was necessary.… And I would go further than he was willing to go, as he just issued the statement, and say it’s time now to repeal that part of the law.… Because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t won’t ever go to a place that’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010; Media Matters, 9/7/2010] Stossel’s position provokes considerable criticism, and the civil rights organization Color of Change calls for a boycott of Fox Business until it fires Stossel. The organization writes: “Stossel’s position is an affront to black America and everyone in this country who believes in racial progress. It’s one thing to be a candidate with backwards views [referring to Paul]. It’s another to be employed by a supposed news network and to use that platform to push hateful ideas that our nation repudiated decades ago. It’s time that Fox drop Stossel.” [Salem News, 5/22/2010] US Representative Bob Filner (D-CA), a veteran of civil rights protests, responds: “A ‘private’ business generally operates on a public thoroughfare, is protected by public police and fire departments, is served by public transportation, is staffed by people educated in public schools, is protected against fraud by the public justice system, may serve food or sell products protected by public inspection agencies, etc., etc., etc. Surely the public has a right to insist on non-racist policies! As a Freedom Rider in 1961, I rode on an interstate, publicly franchised Greyhound bus, and, as a member of an integrated group, was denied access to restrooms, lunch counters, and waiting rooms. The Supreme Court rightly ruled this was unconstitutional. Do Rand Paul and John Stossel want to take us back to a racist past from which so many people gave their lives to liberate us?” [Media Matters, 5/21/2010] Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, says that Stossel has fundamentally misrepresented history, stating, “Market forces hadn’t exactly made anti-black discrimination disappear during the several centuries before the Civil Rights Act.” Even with the progress made since the legislation took effect, Grant-Thomas says, racial discrimination is still a major problem. “If you look at any market for which we’ve done extensive studies, significant discrimination remains,” he says. “It’s clearly better than it was. But there’s still discrimination.” There is a strong market for businesses that “currently, and legally, discriminate on the basis of race, or other grounds, in their membership. That hasn’t caused them to go under. Indeed… in some key arenas, like housing and schools, some people pay more for segregated settings.” He concludes: “The Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed on economic grounds, but on moral and ethical grounds. Suggesting that market logic would have sufficed to weed out discriminators is pretty much besides the point in that respect.” [Media Matters, 5/20/2010] A clearly aggrieved Stossel will respond to the criticism (see July 2, 2010).

Fox Business Channel host and commentator John Stossel goes on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor to defend his recent call to repeal a key element of the Civil Rights Act (see May 20-22, 2010). [Media Matters, 5/25/2010] The 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson, prohibits discrimination in public places, provides for the integration of public schools and other public facilities, and makes employment discrimination illegal (see July 2, 1964). [Media Matters, 9/7/2010; National Archives, 2011] Host Bill O’Reilly is less than sympathetic to Stossel’s call for repeal, noting that one function of government is to protect its citizens, and this includes protecting them from discrimination, even at the hands of private businesses, which Stossel says should not be covered under the law. It is up to the government, O’Reilly says, to ensure every citizen’s “quality of life.” Stossel says he is a libertarian, and like most libertarians, he wants government to protect him from those who would physically hurt him, steal from him, and so forth. “But we want government out of our private lives,” he says, and to expect government to step in to “make life fair” is “an awful idea.” O’Reilly counters that the Declaration of Independence guarantees “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and discrimination denies targeted minorities that “pursuit of happiness.” Stossel, as he did earlier, insists that private businesses rarely if ever practice discrimination in this day and age, and those that do are quickly punished by “market forces”—customers refusing to patronize those businesses, for example. O’Reilly is adamant, saying, “I feel very strongly, if it’s open to the public, then the public has to be” allowed access. [Media Matters, 5/25/2010]

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